4 ms·

windows is getting a lot better but there's no decent tiling window manager. on macos, yabai is quite ok. on linux, it's a the best. just take your pick

WorldMaker 6y ago
Have you had a chance to play with Fancy Zones yet on Windows? (It's in the PowerToys.) It's not quite as full featured as some of the options on other platforms, but I'm finding it scratches the itch for me a lot more than I expected it would at first glance, especially when you allow it to take over the "Aero Snap" keys (Win+Arrow Key). They've been adding and polishing features at a decent pace, and it's worth checking out (again) if you haven't recently.
- tuananh 6y ago
  yes, fancy zones is what i ended up using but i still miss tiling wm.
  - WorldMaker 6y ago
    Yeah, but I find it interesting how much of the itch it already scratches. I've been somewhat keeping an eye on the GitHub issues as you can tell Fancy Zones is very much still a "minimal viable project" to prove interest/demand and there's definitely enough Tiling WM loving developers on the project that they've got some sense of direction towards it, even if they are still more concerned of finding the "Windows way" toward it than going beeline for i3wm or xmonad features.
    - tuananh 6y ago
      if microsoft can pull that off, windows can really shine as a developer friendly OS
      - WorldMaker 6y ago
        One of the things I loved about Windows 8.1 was that it had a Tiling Window Manager getting some real love out of the box. The Window Manager for the "modern" ("metro"/UWP) Windows apps was a tiling WM. It was limited to only vertical splits at the time, and you had to upgrade to the modern apps to get the most benefit from it (the entire Win32 desktop was just a single tile to that WM). At points in 8.1 I'd have a dozen or so tiles across 2 screens on my desktop. It was lovely, for that brief time it existed and there were enough apps to make use of it. When they inverted things back in 10 and put all the modern apps in traditional overlapping Windows, that tiling WM got crippled and relegated back to only support two tiles at a time and then only in Tablet Mode (though it got slightly smarter about semi-maximizing Win32 apps). Windows 1.x itself had only a tiling WM. (Not a great one, mind you.) There's a lot of tiling WM DNA in Windows development history. Like I said the impression I have from GitHub Issues at least is that there are an interesting number of developers of Windows (even if that's a small overall percentage of the huge Windows organization at Microsoft) interested in pursuing good tiling WM tools on Windows. I hope Fancy Zones does continue to be a good playground for exploring that.
bsnnkv 6y ago
I started working on yatta for Windows 10 because I was missing yabai and bspwm after I started working from a Windows 10 desktop last year. I made a post about it on the Rust subreddit yesterday looking for more contributors: https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/lh4uyq/yatta_bsp_tiling_window_manager_for_windows_10/ https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/lh4uyq/yatta_bsp_tili... It's still early days, but it has automatic tiling, gap control, focus switching, directional moving and tree orientation toggling and you can use AHK or any other hotkey daemon to manage your keybindings. You still have to build it from source at the moment, but I'm hoping to have it installable via the Scoop package manager in a month or two. https://github.com/LGUG2Z/yatta https://github.com/LGUG2Z/yatta
- tuananh 6y ago
  cool. i will def. check it out

WorldMaker 6y ago

Have you had a chance to play with Fancy Zones yet on Windows? (It's in the PowerToys.) It's not quite as full featured as some of the options on other platforms, but I'm finding it scratches the itch for me a lot more than I expected it would at first glance, especially when you allow it to take over the "Aero Snap" keys (Win+Arrow Key). They've been adding and polishing features at a decent pace, and it's worth checking out (again) if you haven't recently.

tuananh 6y ago
yes, fancy zones is what i ended up using but i still miss tiling wm.
- WorldMaker 6y ago
  Yeah, but I find it interesting how much of the itch it already scratches. I've been somewhat keeping an eye on the GitHub issues as you can tell Fancy Zones is very much still a "minimal viable project" to prove interest/demand and there's definitely enough Tiling WM loving developers on the project that they've got some sense of direction towards it, even if they are still more concerned of finding the "Windows way" toward it than going beeline for i3wm or xmonad features.
  - tuananh 6y ago
    if microsoft can pull that off, windows can really shine as a developer friendly OS
    - WorldMaker 6y ago
      One of the things I loved about Windows 8.1 was that it had a Tiling Window Manager getting some real love out of the box. The Window Manager for the "modern" ("metro"/UWP) Windows apps was a tiling WM. It was limited to only vertical splits at the time, and you had to upgrade to the modern apps to get the most benefit from it (the entire Win32 desktop was just a single tile to that WM). At points in 8.1 I'd have a dozen or so tiles across 2 screens on my desktop. It was lovely, for that brief time it existed and there were enough apps to make use of it. When they inverted things back in 10 and put all the modern apps in traditional overlapping Windows, that tiling WM got crippled and relegated back to only support two tiles at a time and then only in Tablet Mode (though it got slightly smarter about semi-maximizing Win32 apps). Windows 1.x itself had only a tiling WM. (Not a great one, mind you.) There's a lot of tiling WM DNA in Windows development history. Like I said the impression I have from GitHub Issues at least is that there are an interesting number of developers of Windows (even if that's a small overall percentage of the huge Windows organization at Microsoft) interested in pursuing good tiling WM tools on Windows. I hope Fancy Zones does continue to be a good playground for exploring that.

bsnnkv 6y ago

I started working on yatta for Windows 10 because I was missing yabai and bspwm after I started working from a Windows 10 desktop last year. I made a post about it on the Rust subreddit yesterday looking for more contributors: https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/lh4uyq/yatta_bsp_tiling_window_manager_for_windows_10/ https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/lh4uyq/yatta_bsp_tili... It's still early days, but it has automatic tiling, gap control, focus switching, directional moving and tree orientation toggling and you can use AHK or any other hotkey daemon to manage your keybindings. You still have to build it from source at the moment, but I'm hoping to have it installable via the Scoop package manager in a month or two. https://github.com/LGUG2Z/yatta https://github.com/LGUG2Z/yatta

tuananh 6y ago
cool. i will def. check it out